Annakerttu Aranko, CEO of the Helsinki-based strategy consultancy Noren, has built her company around a simple but unusual premise: understanding business through the lens of human sciences to advise some of Finland’s leading listed companies.

In this conversation with Listeds, she brings a new perspective to Finland’s sluggish growth – the perspective of the national psyche. A history of scarcity, caution, and quiet resilience has made the Finnish leadership culture and the leaders exceptionally capable operators, but often reluctant risk-takers.  

From scarcity to survival

Finland’s growth problem cannot be separated from its geography and culture, Annakerttu Aranko says. “We’re basically a small island, and a small language area. Our whole business culture has been built around the idea that you must reach everyone. When your domestic market is minuscule, companies learn to optimize for inclusivity rather than focus or scale.”

Finland’s scarcity mindset stems from a survival-driven history, geographic isolation, and limited exposure to cross-cultural trade. These conditions cultivated operational excellence and resilience, but also a cautious attitude toward risk. The country’s rapid transformation from an agrarian economy to a welfare state and digital forerunner left little time for cultural recalibration, and Finnish leadership culture still reflects the logic of deprivation. It prizes discipline, technical expertise, and engineering precision, strengths that have driven Finland’s competitiveness but also anchored leadership thinking in predictability and control.

“If there’s one thing we do well, it’s making more out of less. That ingenuity has defined Finland’s success stories. However, scarcity thinking and growth thinking run on very different logics.” 

Aranko’s view is supported by academic research. For example, a 2019 study in the Journal of Business Research found that “scarcity thinking” – an overemphasis on exploiting existing resources, minimizing risk, and optimizing the familiar – and “growth thinking” – exploring new domains, accepting ambiguity, and tolerating short-term losses – operate under fundamentally different performance logics.

Companies anchored in scarcity thinking may perform well in the short term, but in dynamic markets, they tend to fall behind, as their focus on refinement leaves them less able to adapt. That dynamic helps explain why Finland often leads in efficiency-intensive industries yet struggles to generate new growth engines.

Creativity is not a slogan

Asked about claims that Finnish leaders lack creativity, Aranko doesn’t mince words. “To be honest, the whole creativity debate in Finland frustrates me,” she says. “People keep calling for more creativity, but few can even define what they mean by it.” She’s referring to the recent wave of public discussion on whether Finnish companies and their leaders have lost their creative edge – debates that she considers more rhetorical than diagnostic.

“For me, creativity means the ability to think abstractly”, she explains. “To see complex systems and the causal links within them.” That kind of thinking, she argues, isn’t cultivated enough in Finland’s education or management traditions. Aranko herself has a Master’s degree in International Design Business Management from Finland’s Aalto University, a unique program that highlights cross-disciplinary collaboration and radical creativity.

“Our strength has been in optimizing production and running profitable businesses”, she continues. “But you can’t expect to keep a core business profitable and at the same time chase something completely new.” Growth, in her view, requires rules – and a tolerance for temporary unprofitability.

Two playbooks, not one

That duality between efficiency and exploration sits at the heart of Finland’s growth dilemma. The two goals of achieving growth and maintaining profitability require different playbooks, she says. Yet many Finnish companies insist on running both logics through the same structure and the same people. “Our executive teams are extremely homogeneous. If everyone comes from the same pipeline, that’s where it goes wrong. If you look at Finland’s education system – at how many different kinds of talent it produces – it’s astonishing how little of that diversity ever reaches senior leadership.”

According to data from the Listeds Platform, more than half of the 32 chairperson appointments among listed Finnish companies this year have involved people with an MSc in Economics or an MBA.

Learning to have difficult conversations

Cultural renewal, Aranko believes, depends on the quality of internal dialogue. “It takes skills to have truly hard conversations, the kind that feel really uncomfortable”, she says.

That defensiveness suffocates innovation. “There needs to be a healthy amount of uncertainty”, she says. “Not as weakness, but as vigilance. A constant awareness of whether we’re still in tune with the market.”

Finland’s corporate mindset, Aranko observes, is full of contradictions. “At the same time as we’re extremely cautious about taking risks, we’re also strangely arrogant. Convinced that we’re already the best”, she says.

Despite the challenges, Aranko is optimistic. “I can feel that the pressure cooker is about to burst”, she says.

A new generation of Finnish leaders, she believes, is emerging with a more global and experimental mindset. “They look at things through a completely different logic,” she says. Companies like Oura illustrate that shift.

The question, she adds, is not whether the change will happen, but whether established companies can adapt fast enough.

The question, she adds, is not whether the change will happen, but whether established companies can adapt fast enough.

More about Annakerttu Aranko

Annakerttu Aranko is the CEO and founding partner of the Helsinki-based strategy consultancy Noren, which specializes in using human sciences to drive business innovation. Before that, she was part of the team that founded the business consultancy SKOG Helsinki.

Image credit: Annakerttu Aranko